"Oblong Tin, Yellow Box" by Sophie Mihm (Kennebec County Winner)

Despite no sinewed ties,

sardines remain still,

too tethered to brothers’ sullied flesh and blood.

Do swallowed pleas to dry and

to wither in the salt resound, or

become stifled by the over-saturation?

The latter - this dread, pressed slick against

skin stretched 'cross indrawn curvature,

curses you an inaudible plaster to another.

Steeped in oil and in sweat and in dust and in

semi-selfish revolts against homemade brine,

you must smother those violent aches for disruption.

And though this asphyxiation calls to

tear, to pull, to fold away, to resist that

you are too tall, too brittle, too fragile, too prone to cleave in two halves,

Do not forget that spinelessness abandoned you to

be hollow in an unlucky vessel of fictionary solitude,

a simple marinated fish in its own unsung sorrows.

So, your paralysis will remain,

its settlement the heaviest burden on those

hundred-fold, silver-lined, gullibly waiting scales.

Maybe I am the lucky one.

---

Sophie Mihm, of Sidney and a Messalonskee High School senior, is an activist and interdisciplinary artist. Their poem, "Oblong Tin, Yellow Box," is an extended metaphor of a claustrophobic sardine that honestly and vulnerably illustrates her OCD's impact on a particular taxi cab journey. Sophie is passionate about contemporary composition, poetry, visual art, and advocacy pertaining to intersectional feminism and LGBTQ+ inclusion.